1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an improved data center. In particular, the present invention relates to provisioning storage in a data center. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to storage provisioning automation in a data center with a storage manager.
2. Description of Related Art
In a data center environment, storage provisioning is assigning of storage to a number of resources, including hardware and software resources. Examples of resources include storage area network (SAN) fabric and volume managers. SAN is a high-speed subnetwork of shared storage devices. A storage device is a machine that stores data in a disk or disks. SAN enables servers to quickly access data from the subnetwork of the shared storage devices. A volume manager is a software tool that allows storage drive space to be added or expanded on the fly without system reboots or shutdowns. With a volume manager, the physical drivers or hard disks are organized into volume groups with logical volumes in each of the volume groups. By keeping the hardware and software separate, drive changes can be made without shutdown and reboot. Thus, data may be moved to a different location while the system is running.
Existing storage provisioning solutions manage SAN fabric resources and volume manager resources separately. Volume manager or software storage provisioning is not integrated with the SAN fabric storage provisioning at the backend. Thus, software storage provisioning is managed from a switch or a SAN subsystem at the backend. This lack of integration makes defining software storage requirements difficult, because these solutions may be vendor specific.
In addition, existing storage provisioning solutions do not provide an end-to-end solution to servers that require creation and mounting of a file system for the SAN storage volumes to be usable. Furthermore, existing storage provisioning solutions do not handle direct access storage devices (DASDs), which are hard disks located on the servers. Currently, storage configuration for DASDs is managed through local storage.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method for storage provisioning automation in a data center that facilitates storage provisioning to servers regardless of the type of storage devices. It would also be advantageous to have an improved method that makes a file system available for subsequent software installation or data storage.